a final letter
to him
still not posted

Through seaweed dry, mangled like torn sparrow, she toes past the cameras and smart phones, behind which decent men drop decent suits to dress in younger urges.

Onward past the envy of white bellies offered shyly to the sun, pinker bodies limpet glued to pebbles, perched on rubber air. Thin bodies, white, angular, pieces of a jigsaw unwrapped from City streets.

Home to the rhythm of scenery less serene, a crowded train, a busy street, trees no longer green.

beside the keyboard
a dead apple
she left on the desk

—From the haibun collection The Trouble with Mona Lisa (Alba Publishing, 2015); republished here by author’s permission

Peter Butler

turned to poetry after a long career as a journalist, editor, and feature writer in book publishing and industry. He has published two well-received collections of poetry, Lunch at Shakespeare’s Local and Teatime on the Moon, and his ventures into haiku and its variants have been published in the USA and UK. A Piece of Shrapnel is his first haibun collection.

Butler lives in London and is a frequent guest reader on the poetry circuit.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Class of ’52, haibun from A Piece of Shrapnel by Peter Butler in Contemporary Haibun Online (Volume 9, Volume 2, July 2013)

⚡ On Peter Butler’s A Piece of Shrapnel, a review by Ryan Jessup in Haibun Today (Volume 7, Volume 1, March 2013)

⚡ And a slightly different take: A Piece of Shrapnel [by] Peter Butler, reviewed by Matthew Paul in A Hundred Gourds (June 2014)